Copenhagen Wheel: Will “smart bikes” cure our traffic-throttled future cities?
Superpedestrian’s Copenhagen Wheel turns any bike into an electric bike, an intelligent one at that. We take the former James Dyson Award (JDA) winner out for a spin…
The Problem: Ageing and unintelligent transportation
Urban transportation links are the lifeblood of any city. And yet, increasingly they are struggling to keep up with their growing populations.
Take London for example: Road congestion in the UK’s capital has increased by 6 percent in just 8 years. Now delays caused by traffic account for an extra 40 minutes of travelling for commuters every day — or 152 hours a year.
According to a recent study of urban infrastructure, in 30 years from now it will cost $829 billion per year across the globe to keep our cities moving. This is four times more than in 1990.
Some cities, like London, have advanced metro networks taking people underground and off the crowded roads. Others, like Amsterdam, have promoted bicycles and cycle lanes. Fifteen years ago there were just four bike-sharing schemes in the world, now there are almost 1,000.
Currently, 27 percent of all journeys in the Netherlands are taken by bike and the Dutch each cycle an average of 1,000km (600 miles) per year — and the government wants to increase this number of kilometres by 20 percent for each person over the next 10 years.
But bikes haven’t changed much since they became popular some 200 years ago. Cities on the other hand are far bigger and have more cars on their roads than ever before. Often bikes are designed for racing and speed, not safety. As a result, they aren’t suited to city driving and aren’t easily usable by citizens with limited mobility.
In London, for example, there have been frequent complaints about the sheer weight of the cities so-called “Boris bikes”. By including the robustness required for regular usage, the bikes were made so heavy that many elderly or disabled people who might benefit most from the scheme, were excluded from it.
Even though they are designed to extend the range of a traditional cycle, electronic bikes (e-bikes) have traditionally suffered from the same problem thanks to their large and clunky batteries. Their weight means that they are usually inefficient and just as hard for less-mobile users as traditional bikes.
It is this dual problem of needing bikes to work harder and smarter that led one team of engineers to rethink how an electric bike should work. Assaf Biderman is a physicist who, with the help of a team of academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has devised a new way to extend the range people can ride, without compromising on the bicycle’s innate usability.
The Solution: Greater urban mobility for all
According to its inventor Assaf, the Copenhagen Wheel “gives more instantaneous power”.
“The power output is synchronised with your body, to the point that you cannot distinguish whether its you controlling the vehicle, or the motor,” he continues.
Assaf and his team at Superpedestrian, a smart bike startup based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, realised that vehicles on the road needed to get “smarter” if they wanted to meet the needs of the urban travellers. They needed to be powerful, efficient and smart enough to take care of themselves.
Despite the sophisticated design of the Copenhagen Wheel, with its immediately recognisable red hub, it’s what’s inside that’s really interesting. Assaf’s team have developed a wheel that can be attached to any normal bike, and which is equipped with a motor power system that can multiply energy — generating up to 20 times the power of every pedal the rider takes.
This saves dramatically on the weight, most of which is distributed in the centre of the wheel’s spokes, rather than in the bike’s frame, which is where batteries are normally located in e-bikes.
It doesn’t stop there. The wheel has also redefined braking. When the rider back-pedals to slow the bike down the friction also creates power which is sent back into the hybrid wheel, adding an extra boost of power to the battery.
This efficiency also extends to Copenhagen Wheel’s “smart” diagnostics system. As well as generating power, the wheel contains four microprocessors that connect to the cloud and share real-time data about the rider. This provides proactive protection that monitors riding conditions, responding to events so that the wheel protects itself in real-time and is alerted if there is a problem.
As well as offering specific efficiencies to each bike, the cloud also allows riders can also use an app to control ride assistance settings like ‘Turbo’, ‘Standard’, ‘Eco’ or ‘Exercise’ if they want “a serious workout”. By connecting the wheel to the cloud people can get software upgrades adding new features and capabilities.
By adding these features, Copenhagen Wheel believes it is just at the beginning of an overhaul in the way technology will shape transportation in the future. “We’re moving towards a world where you and I will move in cities by combining multiple modes of transport and urban platforms are only just emerging.”
If the vehicles are able to self-diagnose and maintain themselves, they have low operational costs, and longer lifespans. Since the Copenhagen Wheel, Superpedestrian has released a scooter, and are looking into covered three-wheeler models. All are powered by the same vehicle-intelligence system and are being rolled out in cities across the globe later this year.
“There is a consensus within academia that by the middle of this century, at least a quarter of trips, on average, will be done on micro-vehicles”, he explains. “These need to be intelligent so that it is sustainable from a business perspective”.
When it comes to the sustainability of this solution, Assaf simply argues: “It is taken for granted that this is integrated into the solution. There is no future transportation solution that doesn’t address the environmental issue.”
Words: Elise Metcalf, Staff writer
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